Surge in US troops will fuel Taliban insugency, former Afghan warlord says

Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, the controversial former Afghan warlord, has warned
Washington that sending more US troops to Afghanistan will simply hamper its
war against the Taliban insurgency.

Abdul Rashid Dostum is greeted by throngs of supporters at a campaign rally in Kabul stadium in 2004Photo: AP

By Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer in Kabul

7:00AM GMT 13 Nov 2009

Only an Afghan-led solution can bring victory, he believes.

His comments in an interview with The Daily Telegraph were made as the American ambassador to Kabul, Gen Karl Eikenberry, warned President Obama not to send thousands more US soldiers to shore up President Hamid Karzai’s regime.

Gen Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, was a central military leader in the Northern Alliance which drove the Taliban from Kabul in 2001 with support from US special forces.

He believes success then was based on Afghan-led troops fighting for the future of their own families. Today, he said, the number of senior Afghan military casualties was negligible because US and Nato commanders were calling the shots.

“The Afghan military failure is a question of commitment and morale: the more foreign money and troops the less Afghans see this war as theirs,” he said. “In the past six years, I have not heard of one Afghan officer of captain or major rank killed in battle.

He was blamed for the suffocation of an estimated 300 Taliban prisoners while they were being transported from a jail after a failed breakout.

More than 60 of Gen Dostum’s men died controlling the breakout, including senior officers, along with the American CIA agent Mike Spann. Senior UN figures believe his decision to accept the surrender of 6,000 militants avoided many more deaths.

Since then he has disarmed and demobilised his 50,000-strong militia and formed a democratic party. He won almost a million votes in the 2005 presidential election. He was sacked as chief of staff to the Afghan Armed Forces’ commander in chief last year after his bodyguards kidnapped a rival ethnic leader, a convicted drugs trafficker, but has been reinstated.

He believes Western leaders are wrong to think Taliban fighters can be lured from the leadership of Mullah Omar, and persuaded to give up protecting Osama bin Laden.

Western pressure to centralise power in Kabul excluded local people from key appointments and billions of dollars in aid. It enriched the political elite but failed to alleviate poverty while undermining local initiative, he said.

He said the West had also misunderstood the role of commanders in Afghanistan’s war-ravaged society. “Are all commanders bad, even those who fought the Taliban and al-Qaeda and have disarmed? They are demanding unicorns in Kabul.”

Unlike many British and US strategists, who favour a political “reconciliation” with “non-ideological” Taliban, Gen Dostum believes a military victory is possible.

“We defeated extremism [in 2001] by a pragmatic military approach, which was linked to trusting people, their communities and involving them in the fight for their future. If this can be done again, we will win,” he said.